Department Overview_Foundations

Learn more about the Foundations year at Cornish!

All first year Visual Art students will complete a first-year sequence of courses called Foundations.

Foundations is an immersive, project-based, interdisciplinary experience that will introduce you to a variety of approaches toward making and thinking. You will work with studio faculty from across the visual arts departments, sampling the distinct languages of each discipline while building a robust foundational set of tools and building a network of friends and faculty with particular expertise. Studio faculty are working artists and designers; they have on-the-ground experiences to share with you and a lived sense of passion and dedication to their crafts.

Artists are stronger in their own craft when they’re exposed to other art forms or diverse media. And we know artists can be extraordinarily adaptive, powerful problem-solvers when their work is grounded in creative thinking and intercultural knowledge.